The Acer CloudMobile S500 sports an 8 megapixel primary camera, putting it on a par with the similarly priced HTC One S and even the higher end Samsung Galaxy S3 and iPhone 5. But of course, megapixel count isn't everything.

You can change the scene mode, though the options are rather limited, with just panorama, HDR, low light and continuous shooting on offer.

You can also change the white balance, brightness, contrast, saturation and sharpness and turn the flash on or off. There aren't any options for manually adjusting the ISO, though.

Beyond that there are a variety of effects to play with, such as Watercolour, Cartoon and Sepia. Some of them have fun results, but in general they won't be very useful for taking proper pictures.

When taking a picture you can either tap to focus or have the camera automatically focus, and there's a slider to zoom in on a subject.

What really struck us when using it was just how fast it is - standard pictures are taken almost instantly, enabling you to fire off loads in quick succession.

This is great when you want to catch something time sensitive or just want to take a lot of photos.

Even in panorama or HDR mode it's generally pretty speedy, taking no more than a few seconds before it's ready to shoot again.

You can also take pictures while filming, which is a feature that has started to filter into high-end phones but still isn't commonplace.

It can be really useful, though, if you want to capture both photos and video of something.

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